Phyllida Lloyd's all-female production of Julius Caesar at the Donmar is
gimmicky, humourless and slow

There are few, if any, plays quite so charged with testosterone as Julius Caesar, Shakespeare’s dramatisation of the life and bloody death of the Roman general and statesman.

This hasn’t, alas, dissuaded Phyllida Lloyd from staging an all-female version in her comeback production for the Donmar. After the success that she had directing the films Mamma Mia! and The Iron Lady, Lloyd clearly takes the view that she, like Caesar’s ambitious lieutenants, can get away with murder.

We should probably count our blessings that she didn’t feel the need to go the whole hog and tell the story to the music of Abba – “Julia” Caesar could have belted out SOS as she lay, bleeding, upon the floor. But, joking apart, what a load of old tosh it all is.

Gimmicky, humourless and strained, it would assuredly have had its writer feeling every bit as betrayed as Brutus, or Brunhilda, as we should perhaps think of him now.

Shakespeare never, after all, believed that a single word he wrote would ever be uttered upon a stage by a woman, because the Lord Chamberlain had decreed that female parts could only be played by young men in drag. Lloyd nevertheless wants to dragoon this of all writers into making the voguish point that there are a lot of women of a certain age who are not getting the roles that are their due because the parts aren’t being written for them.

What fools she makes of the fine actresses that she has assembled for this vanity project. Harriet Walter, reunited with her for the first time since they collaborated on the Donmar’s 2005 production of Schiller’s Mary Stuart, plays Brutus, and, with her very severe haircut, she looks uncannily like the Doctor Who star Matt Smith. She gets to utter such immortal lines as “Shut the f--- up.”

Frances Barber brings none of the necessary authority and dignity to imperial Caesar, and, indeed, looks more like Norman Wisdom in her funny little skew-whiff hat. She shouts and screams like an old fishwife. This would-be emperor might just as well have worn no clothes, too, given how moth-eaten her old tracksuit looks.

Lloyd attempts to justify the outrageous liberty that she has taken with Julius Caesar by setting it against the backdrop of a women’s prison, where clearly the inmates have to make do with what they’ve got when they set about putting on a special production of the tragedy. It is an absurd contrivance which serves only to demonstrate quite how imprisoned the director is by a patently daft idea, if not also her political correctness and vanity.

Bunny Christie’s design for the prison is gruesome: she has stripped out eveything there is from the Donmar’s auditorium so that it feels like a big, cold, unwelcoming warehouse.

The two-hour-plus sentence that Lloyd has handed down to the audience passes all the more slowly because her designer has wickedly even taken away the comfy cushioned seating and replaced it with hard plastic chairs. And lest anyone think of making a run for it, there is no interval.

Anyone who tries to take refuge in sleep is roused every now and again with deafeningly loud heavy metal music and strobe lighting.

“You might as well f--- off now and and try to get your money back,” one of the inmates shrieks at the audience half-way through proceedings, and frankly it was the most sensible line I heard all night.

There is a certain poetic justice that Lloyd’s effort should find itself in direct competition with the classy, respectful and hugely entertaining all-male versions of Twelfth Nightand Richard III, which are running in rep at the Apollo. These productions would undoubtedly have met with Shakespeare’s approval. Lloyd’s, by contrast, would have appalled him as she has lost sight of the simple fact that the play ought to be the thing.

A group of spotty sixth-formers might just about have got away with an abomination like this as an end-of-term show in the mid-Eighties, when it was considered rather clever to muck about with classic works.

How Phyllida Lloyd imagined that anyone at an intelligent venue like the Donmar could today have seen anything to hail about her Caesar is quite beyond me.